Sunderland manager Tony Mowbray has enjoyed a promising start to life in the dugout at the Stadium of Light since taking over from Alex Neil at the helm.
The former Blackburn Rovers boss has only lost two of his eight Championship matches since his first game against Rotherham and has the club sitting ninth in the table as it stands.
Neil was also a success on Wearside as he guided the team to promotion out of League One via the play-offs in less than a year in charge before he moved on to Stoke.
However, the Black Cats have not always had the best of luck with managerial appointments and one who stands out, for the wrong reasons, is Paulo Di Canio.
The Italian joined the club in March 2013 and picked up eight points from seven games at the end of the 2012/13 campaign. He then failed to win any of the first five Premier League matches of the following campaign and was sacked in September 2013, six months after arriving at the Stadium of Light.
Will Mowbray be a success at Sunderland?
His results on the pitch left a lot to be desired and his work in the transfer market in the summer of 2013 also caused plenty of problems for the club moving forward.
One of the signings the former West Ham midfielder had a nightmare with was his compatriot Emanuele Giaccherini. Sunderland snapped him up from Juventus for a fee in the region of £6.5m, after playing for Italy at the European Championships in 2012.
He had scored six goals and provided seven assists in 52 outings for the Old Lady and the left-winger was unable to improve upon those average numbers after moving to England.
Giaccherini scored four goals and assisted four in 32 Premier League matches in his first two seasons – suffering an ankle injury in his second campaign – with the Black Cats before heading out on loan to Bologna for 2015/16, where he found the back of the net seven times in 28 Serie A appearances.
Sunderland then opted to cash in on the Italian in the summer of 2016 as they decided that he was ‘surplus to requirements’ and sold him to Napoli for a fee of £1.2m.
This meant that the club lost out on £5.3m from the initial price they paid for him in 2013, a decrease in value of roughly 82% from £6.5m.
When you consider this and his sporadic impact on the team with a goal contribution every four league outings, Di Canio made a mistake by deciding to splash the cash on him during his only window in charge of the club.
